


Common Prayer

by disenchanted



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Christianity, Class Issues, Getting Together, Height Differences, Identity Issues, M/M, hymn-singing, stupid sexy Gibson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-13
Updated: 2018-12-13
Packaged: 2019-09-17 18:01:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16979256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted
Summary: Hickey and Gibson get to know each other biblically.





	Common Prayer

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt on the [Terror kink meme](https://terrorkinkmeme.dreamwidth.org): I'd love something that weaves together the physical contrast between Gibson and Hickey and the class difference between Gibson's apparent respectable working-class /lower middle-class background and Hickey's disreputable poverty. Bonus points for a cameo for Goodsir's weirdly misplaced snobbishness (bold and slightly innocent of him to assume Hickey had any sort of mother figure in his life, adept at managing the inner organs of beasts and fowls or not, right?)
> 
> Unfortunately I wasn't able to work in much Goodsir, but maybe next time.

It was September 1846, and Hickey was attending Captain Crozier’s divine service for the second time. After the first time, he had spent nearly a year avoiding it, malingering and volunteering for extra duty in turns. He was here now for no reason other than that he wanted to see him and be near to him: Gibson, William or Billy, the steward with the red curly hair whose face got stranger the longer you looked at it, who had, after dinner two days ago, propositioned Hickey, and who was praying now with his hands clasped in front of him like a tomb effigy. They were standing next to each other, crowded into a corner of the great cabin with the rest of  _Terror_ ’s petty officers; Hickey’s elbow brushed against Gibson’s flank, and the side of Hickey’s boot came up against Gibson’s.

So close—closer now than they had been the other evening, when Gibson leant down and murmured that he could find him when he was off-duty if he liked—Hickey was aware of how much taller Gibson was than he, and how much more delicate. Despite that the top of Hickey’s head came up to about the bottom of his nose, Gibson’s hands were the same size as Hickey’s, and just as slim. The flesh of his fingers was red-pink, thin-skinned and blood-filled.

As Crozier read from the Book of Common Prayer, Gibson’s eyes wandered. ‘If thou hast little, do thy diligence gladly to give—’ There Crozier’s voice cracked, on the eye in ‘give’, and Hickey imagined Gibson as a boy, attending both Sunday services at St Thomas’ because his mother felt it would be right for them to be seen being devout, even in the back rows and in their secondhand clothes. Gibson had spoken of his mother sometimes, infrequently, when the men talked about England, and it was the way he spoke of her that made Hickey realise how young Gibson was. Younger than him, probably. He said this was only the second voyage on which he served as a steward, not a ship’s boy. But he knew how to look in your eyes and make you understand he was imagining being fucked by you. He’d learnt it somewhere, on a ship or in the streets of Salford with his widowed mother at his side.

Crozier led the men in ‘Gloria in excelsis’ without singing himself. Evans and Manson belted uproariously, while McDonald tried, in a resonant baritone, to keep his half of the cabin in tune. Goodsir, who sung with his eyes closed, seemed the only one who was really pious. Gibson’s voice was very soft, so that if Hickey had been singing himself he wouldn’t have been able to hear him, but it was unutterably sweet. When he noticed that Hickey was listening to him, he elbowed him in the shoulder, which was one of the only intimacies allowed to them here in front of the rest of the men.

 

* * *

 

The orlop was Hickey’s place. Early in the voyage, when he spent his off-duty hours wandering the ship simply to see what was in it, he had found this little corner in among the barrels of provisions and spare rigging. It was as quiet a place as he could get on  _Terror_ , somewhere to be alone with himself and to think. Now Gibson was here with him, ducking his head to fit into the space that held Hickey comfortably. Gibson took Hickey’s hand and kissed the back of it; Hickey pulled his hand away, startled by this newlywed affection.

‘Let me kiss you,’ said Gibson, taking Hickey’s jaw in his small slim hand.

‘Quiet,’ said Hickey. But he did let Gibson kiss him: he lifted his whole body up onto the balls of his feet, bringing himself up to a level to be kissed, and held himself steady with his hands to Gibson’s chest. Gibson was awkward at first, out of practise even if he was clearly not unpractised; he kissed too shyly, refusing to let Hickey have more than a few dry presses of the lips, until Hickey opened his mouth and wet Gibson’s lips with his tongue. Gibson made a soft relenting noise into the kiss. It was too dark for them to see each other’s faces, but Hickey thought of the way Gibson’s lips looked coral-coloured in the lamplight.

Who was the last person he had kissed? Hickey asked himself. He couldn’t remember, he was dizzy with the rush of blood away from his head. Gibson was rubbing his hand up his front, pulling at his neckerchief without unbuttoning his waistcoat. He was a tease, a fucking tart. Ah yes, thought Hickey, it was the man whose name and place he had taken. Cornelius Hickey had been eager to kiss, even as E.C. buggered him. Whiskey had made him bold. Not Gibson, who seemed, as he felt his way into Hickey’s slops, somehow demure.

However thoroughly Gibson had been kissed or fucked before, it had not been filthy enough to push him beyond shame. He had never sucked cock in a doorway outside of a gin shop, he had never taken sixpence from a decent man slumming it somewhere his wife would never find him, he had never been spat on by a man who’d just come in his arse and, having got his satisfaction, began to loathe himself again. That was why he trembled like a nervous animal when Hickey unbuttoned his slops for him and tugged at his prick (and such a fine thick prick, thought Hickey, for a man who would never fuck anyone with it). That was why he hid his face in Hickey’s neck, even though he had to stoop to do it. Hickey wasn’t sure whether it was a mercy or a laughable accident, that luck of his. Born in a decent house, to a mother who would live and who would care for him, with a bed for him to lie in and frig himself and wonder what his dreams meant.

‘Not yet,’ muttered Gibson against Hickey’s neck. When Hickey kissed him again, his prick twitched against Hickey’s palm.

‘Why not?’ asked Hickey. He smiled up at Gibson, knowing that he wouldn’t see it. It was the same smile E.C. had given Cornelius Hickey after he told him where the ship would be going. Someday, in a warmer place, Hickey would remember Gibson fondly, and wish that he could be there with him in the sunlight.

‘I don’t want to go,’ said Gibson. ‘I’ve got to serve dinner…I’d rather drown.’

‘No you wouldn’t,’ said Hickey, and got down on his knees and took the head of Gibson’s cock between his lips, sucking it gently, knowing that that would shock him into spending. It did: Gibson couldn’t help putting his fingers in Hickey’s hair, jerking his hips just once as he gasped and shook. With a hand on Gibson’s thigh, Hickey felt how his legs stiffened, then trembled, as he fought to stay upright. Because he liked the thought of having Gibson inside him, keeping him in his stomach even after they parted, Hickey swallowed, then stood.

‘Please,’ whispered Gibson, hunching down to kiss Hickey’s mouth, ‘let me see you again. I want to do this again.’ He was still wild and stupid with pleasure. Hickey put the back of his hand to Gibson’s cheek and felt his flush, hot as a fever: if he didn’t know the cause of it he would be worried.

Hickey’s prick was still up, rising stiff from his unbuttoned slops, leaking onto his shirttail. He went on kissing Gibson, letting Gibson find his own way to his prick, which he then tugged at cautiously, as if he’d never handled one before. Hickey laughed, then swallowed the noise and leant against Gibson’s chest and frigged himself on Gibson’s palm until he spent, his mouth on Gibson’s shoulder, Gibson’s scent in his nose, the taste of his spend and the fabric of his waistcoat on his tongue.

Held close, circled in Gibson’s voluminous sleeves, Hickey felt his own smallness against Gibson, and at the same time Gibson’s fragility. Gibson had lungs that could go bloody, skin that could split. He had not already been broken and set and strengthened: there was something tender about him, like milk teeth, a thing Hickey wanted to pluck out and take as a keepsake, hide in his sea chest with the ring he had stolen from the corpse of David Young. But Gibson belonged to  _Terror_  above all, and now that Hickey had spent he was running his fingers through Hickey’s hair and pushing at Hickey’s shoulders, pushing him away.

‘Will you?’ asked Gibson, before they really parted.

Hickey rose to his toes to give him a last kiss for good luck and found that Gibson held him there, unsteady, his weight resting against him so that if he was let go he would drop. He leant into Gibson and let him feel that he did, which was as pure and ridiculous an expression of trust as he had ever given a man in his life, in Hickey’s life or E.C.’s. When he climbed the ladder he hummed ‘Gloria in excelsis’, and as he surfaced onto the main deck, began to whistle.

 

* * *

 


End file.
